That was another good night of raiding, tier 2 (even when we're losing) is just so much more satisfying than tier 1. Tier 1 wound, once we got a basic level of competence and coordination, was just a joke. Last night was a proper raid. We had a lot to learn. Personally, I threw myself in a new channel after some intial shuffling and slowed the group down while I learned how to best use my skills to get those mobs down. But the satisfying thing about that part of the fight is that you can really see your individual contribution making a difference and I know we were hitting that final lever in our channel far faster at the end than we were at the beginning.

Overall, the main room was pretty messy, but again, we started getting a hold of the mechanics and it only took 3 attempts in there to beat it which was satisfying. And one of those attempts also had an unintendedly large number of adds - don't worry Jay, it's happened before!!

A couple of points I'd like to bring up there though - first there were still too many group-wide stuns for how much practice we've had at spotting/potting adverse effects like this, particularly in the closest channel but there were a few which happened across the raid including in the main room. If you have issues spotting your eyes/wounds in among all the insanity then, as we keep mentioning, I highly recommend loading some combination of buffbars and palantir and playing around with the options to make it obvious. The other thing is that if you get a wound that you can't clear because your potion is on cooldown (or you hit the wrong one lol) then at least make sure to run away from the group. The AoE of the stun isn't that large. Similar comment with the mammoth-targeting eyes in the boss room, though we got noticably better at those on our later attempts.

Second is the grouping up in the main room. We've relaxed our positioning/ball up strategy a bit because there are lots of reasons people need to move around, eg. getting out of clouds, picking up renewers, running away from mammoths, but the basic idea there is still that we want to pull all adds into a ball near the gate for maximum AOE goodness. Related to this, is that people need to take responsibiliity for keeping your healers alive (and healers need to help here by staying as close to the ball as possible - yes, I know range can be an issue with healing, but generally try to get back to NEAR the main group as much as possible). Champs need to AOE near the healers and everyone needs to what you can to pull adds of them, even if that means going against the current RAT.

Fear wing, what can I say.... FARM. lol. We just had to fix some tank-communication issues that we had the first time, and the second run was pretty darn smooth. A few people didn't turn around quickly enough for the text call out but overall, nice run. I shouldn't get cocky, T2 will own us, but it's still not an easy fight.

Something we'll try on future fear attempts is to start working on the rotation positoning that we'll need to do on T2. We'll plan that ahead of time, but just to let you know that we will be making that fight harder on subsequent attempts in order to try to get ready for the madness that is tier 2.

Anyway, looking forward to this week. We'll be trying to roll locks over to give us a better chance of seeing the Ivar fight, so everyone who was there last night has a reserved slot. but the way these things go we'll probably have a slot or two open up if people can't make it . Please respond in the sign-up post at least 24 hours before the start to secure your slot, and tell us as early as possible if you can't make it too.

I think that went very well and that no one gave up as we were wiping on the corridors (bring back some memories of the very first tries of that at T1 a couple of months ago) was also a good sign.

A T2 clear, without any cappies, is a great outcome and while not wanting to blow our own horns too much, it puts us maybe in the top 5% of LOTRO players.

While our previous try at the Trees on T2 didn't end so well, it's clear that it helped a lot in experience when it comes to T2 trash and being able to focus ones gameplay. This then clearly showed in how fairly easily we took down the T1 trash on the fear wing and while we shouldn't get too over confident, it bodes well for the day when we can rip through a T1 clear as if if was a GB STM run.

I'm not sure about others, but this has also been great for my solo play. On top of just learning my Champ even more, a couple of months ago, if I came across a lvl64-65 rare elite with over 3 times my morale, I would just run the other way. Now, I think bring it on and take it down without even needing my big 30min cooldown heal skill